Trillion Frames Per Second Camera

A new camera developed at MIT can photograph a trillion frames per second.

Compare that with a traditional movie camera which takes a mere 24. This new advancement in photographic technology has given scientists the ability to photograph the movement of the fastest thing in the Universe, light.

The actual event occurred in a nano second, but the camera has the ability to slow it down to twenty seconds.

For some perspective, according to New York Times writer, John Markoff, "If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years."  READ MORE...

Iran Will Destroy Israel

The New York Times is facing intense backlash for a report focusing on whether Iran will "live up to its fiery rhetoric" and follow through with its vow to "destroy Israel."

The Times suggested Iran was at a crossroads, running the headline, "After Years of Vowing to Destroy Israel, Iran Faces a Dilemma."

"With Israel bent on crushing Iran’s ally Hamas, Tehran must decide whether it and the proxy militias it arms and trains will live up to its fiery rhetoric," The Times report said Wednesday.  READ MORE...

Unintended Consequences of Monumental Inventions

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It was said that Thomas Midgley Jr. had the finest lawn in America. Golf-club chairmen from across the Midwest would visit his estate on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, purely to admire the grounds; the Scott Seed Company eventually put an image of Midgley’s lawn on its letterhead. Midgley cultivated his acres of grass with the same compulsive innovation that characterized his entire career. 

He installed a wind gauge on the roof that would sound an alarm in his bedroom, alerting him whenever the lawn risked being desiccated by a breeze. Fifty years before the arrival of smart-home devices, Midgley wired up the rotary telephone in his bedroom so that a few spins of the dial would operate the sprinklers.

In the fall of 1940, at age 51, Midgley contracted polio, and the dashing, charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. At first he took on his disability with the same ingenuity that he applied to maintaining his legendary lawn, analyzing the problem and devising a novel solution to it — in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, allowing him to clamber into his wheelchair each morning without assistance. At the time, the contraption seemed emblematic of everything Midgley had stood for in his career as an inventor: determined, innovative thinking that took on a seemingly intractable challenge and somehow found a way around it.

Or at least it seemed like that until the morning of Nov. 2, 1944, when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. The public was told he had been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. Privately, his death was ruled a suicide. Either way, the machine he designed had become the instrument of his death.

Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and refrigeration. “The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr. Midgley’s death,” Orville Wright declared. “I have been proud to call him friend.” But the dark story line of Midgley’s demise — the inventor killed by his own invention! — would take an even darker turn in the decades that followed. 

While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.  READ MORE...

Russia Deciding to Use Nuclear in Ukraine

Senior Russian military commanders recently discussed how and when the Kremlin would use tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) in Ukraine, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.


According to the report, President Vladimir Putin was not part of the conversation. Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Tuesday that there were no indications that the Russian leader "has made a decision at this time to employ nuclear weapons."


Also on Tuesday, Security Council of the Russian Federation deputy chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on Telegram that Kyiv's objectives to return all occupied territories to its control constituted an existential threat to Russia and would allow for the use of nuclear weapons.  READ MORE...

A Branch of the Nile Reveals...

The Sphinx at the Giza Pyramids on November 20, 2019. KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty Image

A 4,500-year-old architectural marvel that still baffles scientists

Researchers have uncovered a now-dried-up branch of the Nile that came right up to the great pyramid complex of Giza about 4,500 years ago.

Awesome in size, with perfect geometry, and adorned with intricate decorations, the pyramids at Giza, on the outskirts of modern Cairo, served to demonstrate the power of the pharaohs in Egypt's golden ageResearchers have uncovered a now-dried-up branch of the Nile that came right up to the great pyramid complex of Giza about 4,500 years ago.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, explain how ancient Egyptians were able to haul millions of the tons-heavy building blocks to the site of the iconic pyramids over four miles of what is now a desert landscape.

"It was impossible to build the pyramids here without this branch of the Nile," study author and geographer Hader Sheesh said, per The New York Times.       READ MORE...

Galileo Manuscript for the 17th-Century

For more than 80 years, a manuscript drafted by Galileo Galilei was considered “one of the great treasures” of the University of Michigan’s library. That is, until recently, when an expert on the 17th-century astronomer discovered that the document is a 20th-century fake.

Acquired by the school in 1938, the top half of the single-leaf letter finds Galileo reflecting on the potential uses of a telescope he built in 1609. On the lower part, the Italian scientist demonstrates one of the first observations he made with the instrument: glowing objects around Jupiter that appeared to move position nightly—the planet’s moons.

Galileo’s revelation would, in due time, have profound implications on our understanding of the universe. And the document, according to the university, was thought to be among the first pieces of “observational data that showed objects orbiting a body other than the earth.”

But in May, Georgia State University historian Nick Wilding made his own important observation: the Galileo letter had a few suspicious peculiarities.

The researcher, who is working on a book about Galileo, found there was no record of the manuscript in Italian archives. In fact, there was no record of the document at all before 1934, when it was acquired at auction by a Detroit businessman. (The owner donated the letter to the university upon his death, four years later.)

Wilding also noticed that, even though the two sections of the letter were written months apart, the ink appeared consistent across both.

“It just kind of jumps out as weird,” he told the New York Times this week. “This is supposedly two different documents that happen to be on one sheet of paper. Why is it all exactly the same color brown?”

The catalogue for the auction at which the manuscript first appeared further inspired doubt in the historian’s mind. It claimed that a former archbishop of Pisa had authenticated the letter by comparing it to two other Galileo documents that had been given to him by Tobia Nicotra—an infamous counterfeiter from Milan.

Wilding reached out to the University of Michigan library with his evidence, and after conducting its own investigation into the provenance of the piece, the institution came to the same conclusion: The manuscript was a forgery. The school announced the news this week.  READ MORE...

New Covid Cases Rising

White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Ashish Jha says the “vast majority” 

of COVID-19 infections aren’t being counted.   GETTY IMAGES

While fears may be growing that another COVID-19 surge will be upon us in the coming months, there is some indication that the future is now.

There’s a reason data show that, while the U.S. positivity rate of COVID tests has spiked to five-month highs, and hospitalizations have steadily climbed to four-month highs, new daily COVID cases have held steady for the past couple of months.


The new cases are being undercounted because results of widely available at-home tests aren’t being reported for government tabulation. The Fourth of July holiday has also caused reporting delays. And many states have stopped providing daily updates, as the New York Times reported.

“There’s no question in my mind that we’re missing a vast majority of infections right now,” White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha said on NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt” on Thursday. “The truth is, there are probably several hundred thousand, four or five hundred thousand, infections today happening across the country.”

That would put the daily case count at levels seen during the January surge of the omicron variant. The current outbreak is now mostly the result of the fast-spreading BA.5 subvariant, named the dominant strain this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  READ MORE...

Got Your Head in the Clouds?

The heavy mist seems to cling to everything. Walking through the haze makes any forward motion feel like a fruitless effort.

Any of this sound familiar? It may be because you’re languishing—a feeling of stagnation or emptiness. And naming it is a first important step, Penn’s Adam Grant, a professor of Management with the Wharton School, explained in a New York Times article. Once you can identify languishing, it can help bring clarity to one’s experiences.

Furthermore, charting our collective response to a disaster such as a global pandemic allows us to recognize where we are and how we can move forward. The American Psychiatric Association has identified emotional phases of disasters to understand how communities of people react over time.

A disaster event is followed by the heroic phase, where people come together—that lasts for a short time during the honeymoon period. This is followed shortly by disillusionment when reality sets in over what is actually happening and what it will take to recover. Languishing can occur during this period of disillusionment and recovery. Over time, recovery and reconstruction occur.

“When we talk about the amount of people who are languishing, we are talking about people who are not reaching their full potential,” said Lisa Bellini, MD, MACP, senior vice dean for Academic Affairs and a professor of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.    READ MORE...

Conservative Philanthropy

Black cabinet member Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt at the opening of Midway Hall in May, 1943 [Courtesy of The National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division]

While pundits and scholars continue to debate the extent to which Donald Trump’s time in office has eroded American democracy, what is clear is that the former president’s political rhetoric breached the boundaries of acceptable racial discourse in the United States.

Trump assailed Mexicans as criminals, called for a ban on Muslims, said African nations were “shithole countries”, and referred to white supremacists in Charlottesville as “very fine people”. In his final act as president, he showed no remorse for the deadly violence he instigated during the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots with his lies about a stolen election. In so doing, 

Trump mainstreamed white supremacy and a new, more aggressive racial discourse that encouraged his supporters to resist “cancel culture”, the “woke media”, and any semblance of liberal or progressive ideas around identity and race – including using violent resistance to “take back our country”.

Take, for instance, Trump’s executive order banning federal contractors from conducting racial sensitivity training which claimed that such training indoctrinated government workers with “divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies”. 

From banning diversity training to denouncing the New York Times’ 1619 Project on slavery in the US and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which offers an analysis of US history told from the perspective of the oppressed, Trump, his allies and supporters engaged in a full-scale culture war just as a “racial reckoning” was taking place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The massive protests in the summer of 2020, which came about in response to the violent death of a Black man, George Floyd, at the hands of law enforcement, sparked a backlash from the political right which took advantage of white American fears – real or imagined – of becoming a majority-minority.  READ MORE...

The Metaverse

Silicon Valley has been anticipating virtual reality for more than three decades, and keeps running into the same problem: people mostly like actual reality

Maybe this will be my Paul Krugman moment. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist was famously the winner of a study to establish which op-ed commentator was most consistently correct. 

In 1998, he also famously claimed, “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” 

I am not nearly so storied in accomplishments as Krugman. But I do make my living offering predictions and forecasts. 

So I might as well say it: I predict that the metaverse won’t happen.

The “metaverse,” for those who don’t know, is a still-mostly-hypothetical virtual world accessed by special virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology. 

The idea is to create a sort of next-level Internet overlaid on our physical world. People plugged into the metaverse exist in our physical world like everyone else but can see and interact with things that others can’t. 

Think The Matrix or the Star Trek Holodeck or the Fortnite-esque brandscapes of Ready Player One.  READ MORE